The painting of Don Shambroom

 Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on Duchamp’s last day published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task.   When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting.  

Cow Bird

The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of Dana Schutz. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse  starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus.  

The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. 

String Theory 

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in Zombie Formalism. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole.  He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from Rauschenbergian space. On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. 

Symbolic Drift

This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare  ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner  to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For Junger WW1  represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on Heidegger’s understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.)  In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"

 In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an  almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti  or Rudolph Steiner who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian  era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage”  posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of Yuskavage or Currin that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity.  The realm of Blakean innocence finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. 

"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake

Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg  to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work  says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children

Day Lily

First few pages of my book on drawing and painting

                         Premise of Book 

link to buy book on amazon

Drawing is based in the structure of how we see and how we see is revealed from the Renaissance onward in Western Art 

Drawing grows out of our understanding of how the eye shapes our reality but from my exposure to myriad books on how to draw, it is usually taught as an exercise in aesthetics which, by definition, is a branch of philosophy dealing with beauty, art and taste. I am a believer in all three but to worship at that altar can be a real hindrance to learning how to draw. 

Another definition of aesthetics says it deals with the senses. The immediate message we can take from this definition is that knowing and understanding which are the realms of science have nothing to do with art. The aesthetic world is where we go when we tire of the dry world of science and need to breathe directly the fresh air of the sensory world. It is a world where we ask: How does it feel? 

I believe that the visual language at its base is one of cognition. If you were to ask a class of first graders to draw where they would like to be if they were not in school they have at their disposal literally a language of circles, squares, triangles and lines to describe their world. They can take us to a baseball diamond, a zoo or their room with all the objects in it. 

There is no question of taste and sensibility, in fact, the performance of these kids is pretty much uniform. There is no one who excels for his or her aesthetic sensibility. Their drawings are a cognitive act, not an aesthetic one. From an adult perspective we tend to be in awe of their spontaneity but the cognitive power of the universal language they use lets them pragmatically express what they know about the world they live in. 

Ask those same kids four years later to do the same exercise and, except for a few, they would all say, “We are not artists, we can’t draw.” What has changed? The verbal has supplanted the visual language as a way of description except for those “class artist” relatives of the “class clown” (the one you ask to draw some cartoon character for you) who still feel there is some possibility for further use of the visual. 

The class artist knows that the stick figure world is not going to cut it anymore. It cannot describe the complexity of the world they now inhabit; something the spoken and written word can do. The verbal is also a social medium and allows for interpersonal action, which is what is needed in order to be human. What do you teach students that represents a step forward in their development?

 Left to their own devices, the student of artistic ability will take an interest in texture and detail and will receive accolades from their teachers and peers for that achievement. Or there is often an interest in what I call the degenerate form of classical drawing that we find in cartooning especially that of superheroes with its obsession with anatomy and pneumatic form. I have been often asked over the years to judge numerous art contests at the high school level and find that both these modes of drawing dominate the work submitted. Both are dead ends. Or are just ends in themselves, but lead nowhere. There is always the rare cartoonist who goes on to establishing a career or the master of detail who goes on to success as a photo-realist. 

 The only way out of these options is to relive the history of western art and the way it mimics in an oddly self-recursive fashion our self-awareness of the inner cognitive structure of seeing. What has to be pointed out is that we move through the world with ease physically, encountering people and things and cognitively interpreting it, a monumental task that happens as fast as we can “see.” 

The eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world so that we won’t stumble and wallow in the quicksand of incomprehension. I will demonstrate in this book that drawing is grounded in this ordering of perception and is a language that is just as descriptive as the spoken language. Aesthetics is an edifice built on top of this descriptive ability. Beauty and taste are achieved by those who know the language by heart and can stay with it and shape it to speak to more complex issues of the meaning of life. 

 When Kant developed his notion of aesthetics, the language used in the creation of art was fairly homogeneous. It was taught and acquired by all artists in Europe and by the time these artists were ready to create their own body of work, they had years of experience mastering the craft. Art historians could talk about the difference between Raphael and Michelangelo in terms of sensibility and refinement. Their language was for the most part identical, based on some rather solid visual structures, some of which were recent acquisitions such as perspective, but for the most part the language they used already existed in ancient Greece and Rome. The goal was not novelty but emulation of the past, and the glory went to the most perfect mimesis. 

Self Portrait done in 1969 at BU Tanglewood with compressed charcoal